How Natural/Cultured Are You?

The grapevine has it that there are no material or physical facts around any more; everything, including this sentence itself that you are reading right now, is entirely socially constructed. To put it more bluntly, everything is Nurture, and even your basic physical/biological Nature can be de/reconstructed through Nurture. This is one of the greatest debates of our generation : hundred years ago, it used to be Mind Versus (or, even, Over) Matter, and this has now become the one between Nurture Versus (or, Against) Nature.

Coming to the specific question of feminism, some theorists make a distinction between sex which refers to the corporeality of the human body ('Nature'), and gender which are the cultural conventions that establish, promote and legitimise the differences between masculinity and feminity ('Nurture'). For example, it is pointed out that the ways in which little boys and girls are brought up revolve around certain social rules or norms about behaviour ('boys are manly, girls are cry-babies'), dress-codes ('boys wear blue, girls wear pink'), and patterns of recreation ('boys play with guns, girls play at doll-houses'). That is, these are rules which have to do primarily with modes of Nurture and are not necessarily grounded in any Natural distinctions between men and women. So far, so good, and I agree whole-heartedly with feminists who 'take this line'.

There is a new group of feminists these days, however, who argue that Nurture can over-ride Nature in these matters such that sex is not anatomical/biological but is itself a socio-cultural construct, indeed a construct that is forcefully imposed on individuals. That is, there are no biological, material, or physical givens, these givens are themselves socially constructed. In reply to such views, four comments can be made.

Firstly, the very metaphor of Construction implies that there must be a material/biological base upon which this construction is raised; and to argue that this base itself is another construction is to set up an infinite regress. Secondly, we have become more aware than ever before of various patterns of trans-sexuality, but once again what these affirm is that there are certain real sexual boundaries that are being transgressed. If these margins were not real but entirely social constructions, what would be the point of trying to champion trans-sexuality? One would have to give up the prefix trans- and simply talk about one amorphous type of generic sexuality.

Thirdly, certain forms of domination of women do revolve around the issues of gender : for example, young women having to starve themselves to become slim enough for the modelling industry. However, gender-construction is not the final word about all such oppression for many women are oppressed precisely because of their sex, that is the biological make-up of their material bodies.

Fourthly, one can argue that the claim (that Nurture is All) is itself is a specific socio-historical construction. Let us say that a feminist who puts forward this view is writing in 2004 in suburban Chicago : one can then reply that given the social conditions of upper-class women in suburban Chicago, this view follows necessarily. The process does not stop there, for you can repeat the same analysis on me : given the fact that I am a male blogger in the pastoral surroundings of Cambridge University, I cannot but have this view given my socio-cultural environment. And now for You : either you agree with me or disagree with me, but in both cases given your socio-cultural conditions, you cannot but agree or disagree with me.

In other words, to claim that Absolutely Everything is a social construction (including this statement itself) is to condemn oneself at once either to the vortex of an infinite regress or to the banality of repeating what is but trivially true. If you are a cultural determinist (CD) in this rigorous sense, you will have to claim that cultural norms determine or govern everything (including your belief in CD itself), so that there is no real world these norms apply to, operate in, or are about. There is a curious irony here : feminists are usually opposed to various forms of biological/genetic determinism, but these feminists seem to have replaced neurogenetic determinism ('Don't mention Nurture to me!') with another type of cultural determism ('Don't mention Nature to me!').

Finally, an example from a very different context to illuminate why statements such as 'Everything is interpretation' or 'Everything is political' ultimately undermine themselves. This comes from classical Vedantic thought, and revolves around some arguments put forward by Ramanuja (11th century) against the redoubtable Samkara (8th century) who had claimed that this empirical world is an illusion (maya) produced by a great Magician who is himself ultimately an illusion. To this claim, Ramanuja replies that if this great Magician himself is immersed in this illusion, we have the curious case of an unreal Magician who produces unreal objects in an unreal world for unreal observers (and also, of course, for unreal bloggers to report on this curious possibility to unreal blog-readers).